EA Forum Podcast (All audio)

Disclosure: I work at GiveDirectly. This is a linkpost summarizing findings from a pilot we ran in Rwanda. I used AI to assist in writing this post, and it's likely that >30% is AI-generated text. View our blog and watch a video of recipients using AI here: https://www.givedirectly.org/the-robots-work-at-night Last year, GiveDirectly tested whether unrestricted access to an AI chatbot could com...

Losing GPS isn’t an X-risk, but would create a huge disaster on the scale of Covid-19 or bigger. Hi! From 2020 - 2023 I was one of the early employees at Xona Space Systems, a company working on essentially a next-generation version of GPS. I ended up learning a lot about how GPS works and what it's used for, and (due to my personal interest in effective altruism) ended up doing some research into...

Cross-posted from my website. Prior discussion: niplav's shortform (2025); Planning for Extreme AI Risks (2025) by Joshua Clymer A frontier AI company (any one, I don't care which) should close shop and make an announcement along the lines of: Powerful AI could end the human race. We are too worried that we don't know how to make this technology safe. We have decided to shut down because we don't...

TLDR: The animal welfare movement in Africa has made significant progress over the last 5 years, but due to increasing commercialisation of animals on the continent and foreign interest in animal agriculture, now more than ever, it needs to accelerate. Our retrospective look at Europe's trajectory shows that reform did not stem from a gradual shift in attitudes. Instead, it was sparked by intercon...

In Rethink Priorities' (2021-2022) Moral Weights Project, they attempted to compare the welfare ranges of different farmed animals (which basically means comparing how many suffering shrimp are equal to one suffering chicken.) This project is the most comprehensive attempt at doing inter-species welfare comparisons to date, and it makes a very valuable contribution to the field. That said, I think...

This is a link post. In September 2025, I'd become increasingly convinced that a fieldbuilding program for content creators could solve a long-standing bottleneck of expanding reach and trust beyond the AI safety and EA bubble. I had graduated from UCLA a few months earlier when I came across the AI-2027 report which had a significant impact on me. I rejected my six-figure tech consulting offer, l...

This is a link post. I was recently at “Skoll”, the biggest NGO/social entrepreneurship conference. From one conversation to the next, two topics popped up over and over……. and over 1. Scale, Scale, Scale 2. Scale through Government, Government, Government We at OneDay Health grapple with these questions: how then Shall we scale? And shall we through Government? Right now we operate 88 one-nurse h...

TLDR: Sarah Bluhm and I are funding and mentoring ideas-first (as opposed to, e.g., careers-first) EA community builders. If you’re at one of these universities or know someone who is, we want to talk to you, especially this subset: University of Toronto University of Michigan UCLA USC NYU Columbia Claremont Colleges (Claremont McKenna, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Pomona, Pitzer) Stanford Harvard MIT Co...

Apply now Deadline: July 8, 2026 Tentative program dates: August 15 – October 30 Know someone doing serious work on AI, animals, or the long-term future of sentient beings? That someone might be you. As a mentor, you can: Bring your own project idea and get matched with motivated fellows (think: short-term research assistant) Shape the next generation of researchers and practitioners in this space...

This is a link post. Thanks to Arepo, David Thorstadt, Zeshen, and Michael st Jules for looking over this article. Disclaimer: I am not a subject matter expert and this is not a rigorous scientific article. This post is entirely human-written. Introduction In a previous article, I wrote a general introduction to the optimizer's curse, the phenomenon where a combination of random errors and ranking...

I used an LLM to help draft this post and it likely contains >10% AI-generated text, but I’ve edited/rewritten it extensively and endorse it. TL;DR It's unclear how much the intelligence explosion will directly affect agriculture, because it's one of the least cognitive-labor-intensive industries. But the industrial explosion that may follow could make even animal agriculture susceptible to dis...

Suffering-focused ethics (SFE) is a family of moral views that gives special priority to reducing suffering. As you might know, we at the Center for Reducing Suffering find SFE deeply compelling—it is, after all, the backbone of our work. Part of our mission is to research and build a field around SFE. Unfortunately, SFE remains highly neglected in both academia and broader moral discourse. We are...

Statement: I'm far from an EA or AI expert, these are all opinions from an 19 years old EA laypeople (which may be biased or owefully wrong). Welcome to give me any critique in the comments(rather than just downvoting me). I think compared to the abstract philosophical problems(which of course are useful), there are far not enough discussions on the EA Forum of some relaistic topics, for example:...

I'm a freelance web designer and developer who has been concerned about AI and prioritising a transition into AI safety since late 2025. This post is a summary of my experience so far, as a possibly useful addition to the conversation around the need for generalists in AI safety. My hope is that this post can highlight some of the pain points experienced as a 'generalist' trying to work in this fi...

By Abhi Kumar, Associate Program Officer in Farm Animal Welfare Over 100 billion animals are farmed and slaughtered for food every year. At Coefficient Giving, we think one of the highest-leverage, long-term ways to reduce that number is to fund the development of meat alternatives that are good enough for people to adopt. Since 2016, we've allocated several million dollars toward the development...

Hi everyone! Over the last six months or so, those of you who listen to the 80,000 Hours Podcast might occasionally have heard an unfamiliar voice asking questions to our guests. The person behind that unfamiliar voice is me, Zershaaneh! I'm not saying I'm also Banksy, but I'm not not saying that. There are parallels. As a new host of the show, I’m eager to get thoughts about guests to interview,...

At Clearer Thinking, we're running a collaboration survey about the psychological challenges of various kinds related to working on high-impact problems (e.g., existential risk, AI safety, climate change, animal welfare, global health, bio/nuclear safety, and other topics), and what people find helpful in dealing with those challenges. We are interested in hearing from you whether you currently wo...

We're looking at livelihoods research again (contribute ideas or reach out to support the team with your expertise), sharing our new methods site, and releasing updated SADs guidance. Looking at livelihoods and growth again We last conducted research into livelihoods and growth in 2024, leading to the launch of great projects including Lead Research for Action, Better Futures Guide, and other upco...

Crosspost. The best charities save lives for a few thousand dollars. If you earn $100,000 per year and give away 10%, you can save about 100 people over the course of your life. I think we generally aren’t good at visualizing what's really at stake. So here is me attempting vaguely to grok 100 lives. Ted Bundy killed around 30 people. So by saving 100 lives, you’ll save more lives than Ted Bundy k...

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone could engineer a pathogen to spread widely before detection is going up. We've made great progress and we're now running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network, but there's still a huge am...

Five years ago I read a post on the EA Forum arguing that "election campaign contributions might be a way in which you can have a substantial impact as a small donor". It struck me as weird but plausible: a combination that you see a lot of on the Forum. A few months later I read another post, a case for Carrick Flynn in particular. It made a lot of sense, but while I don't remember my specific re...

About one year ago, I started spending most of my time organising PauseAI UK. At that time our largest protest had seen fewer than 50 attendees, no prominent politicians or scientists were associated with PauseAI, and I largely ran the UK chapter by myself. In the past year PauseAI UK has delivered two conferences, written an open letter signed by 63 UK politicians, arranged a conference in the Eu...

This post covers key insights for pandemic risk reduction from our Risk Analysis paper, which was awarded ‘Best Paper of 2025’ Global pandemics, such as the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and most recently, COVID-19, have brought hardship and loss: from global famine to loss of life, from deepening inequality to overwhelming health systems, and more. An important lesson arises: the more prepared we...

Why I stopped donating to animal welfare charities but feel more motivated than ever to redirect money and talent to the cause. I have wanted to write this post for a while. It is an uncomfortable thing to bring up. Many people in the animal welfare space are working really hard, and this post might leave some feeling defeated. But I think this is one of the most important things to talk about in...

This is a link post. FLF is running a competition to find the best workflows and methodologies for using AI to produce reliable, trustworthy knowledge bases, grounded in real-world cases. We’re open-minded on the types of submissions we receive and on how they address the problem. We’ve set aside approximately 200 thousand dollars for prizes. Winning submissions may receive a prize from 5 thousand...